Casual Cool

02.25.13

Giorgio Griffa's Dolce Vita

The Daily Pic: The Italian artist made abstraction loosen up.

This is “Obliquo giallo” ("Yellow Angle") painted in 1971 by the Italian Giorgio Griffa and now at Casey Kaplan, in Griffa’s first American show in four decades. There’s a really lovely casualness about this – the painting’s meant to be folded for storage – that has echoes of Richard Tuttle’s sculptures. What I like about Griffa’s work, however, is that it seems to start in the world of “serious”, unsmiling Greenbergian abstraction, and then let its hair down.